Earth Hour

The above video is the official commercial for Earth Hour 2011 made by Leo Burnett Chicago. Earth Hour is a global initiative that takes place on 8:30pm on Saturday, March 26. The occurrence initially started as a single-city event in Sydney, Australia in 2007 but quickly spread throughout the entire world. For more information on Earth Hour itself, go to earthhour.org

Before I dive into my analysis, I think the best way to get an understanding of my perspective is by watching their “Making of” movie about this TV commercial.

In the second short film, they discuss how they went about it. My issue with campaigns that are intended to be targeting everyone, I have always felt that targeting everyone misses everyone at the same time. Apparently they had people from “all walks of life” acting in this video. From the commercial, it was hard to tell the different people apart – so having that as a selling point to convince people to participate in Earth Hour is not very convincing.

By targeting an unspecific demographic and claiming it as everyone, one can simply release an advertisement to the world, on different media and assume that they had an impression. This method is much harder to reveal the impression it had on people especially because the Leo Burnett blog claims to have had extreme success in EarthHour 2010. With extreme success like that, it would be hard to tell whether any added reported participants came from the impression of the advertisement or from word of mouth between people who participated yesteryear and people who would benefit from it all.

Overall in my perspective, I believe advertisements should have a specific demographic in mind when creating the advertisement, otherwise they may miss the boat overall.